Trilogy of strategies of disruption in research methodologies: article 3 of 3: The evocative power of tourism studies: positive interruption, interdependence, and imaging forward today

Abstract

In this third of three cousin articles on the call for disruptive qualitative research approaches, further treatment is proffered on the concerns and irritations that "soft science"/"subtle science" social scientists (and humanists, and posthumanists) are troubled by today. While the opening article (by Hollinshead, Suleman, and Nair here in Tourism, Culture & Communication) laid out the general case for the fit of disruptive qualitative research advances cum dissident interpretive research overtures in Tourism Studies to help atone for the field's long-recognized biases towards highly economic/linear/ empirical outlooks, the second article (by Hollinshead, Suleman, and Vellah) constituted a consolidation of the advanced social justice orientations being aired across the trio of articles. In this third of the three bedfellow articles, the authors (Hollinshead, Suleman, and Lo) now provide further critique on the soft science constructions and the subtle science thinking that have been promoted within the landmark text on advanced qualitative and interpretive praxis by Brown, Carducci, and Kuby (entitled Disrupting Qualitative Inquiry). In this third article, the need for such dissident developments within Tourism Studies is provided with respect to a number (10) of common ontological issues encountered in research into tourism/travel today, such as the difficulty in researching the shadowy and indistinct "unique ways" in which foreign peoples differ from each other. At the end of this article, a further 15 terms are made manifest for the cumulative glossary being developed across the three companion articles. These terms include "critical ethnography" (vis-à-vis the revised cognitive practices of tourism) and "unsettlement" (vis-à-vis the rhetorics of futurity of tourism). This third article—like its two predecessors—is notably Deleuzian in hue, although readers should spot the conceptual mark of (Arturo) Escobar (and considerations of pluriversality that emanate from "The South") in places.